Trickster Tricksy Two-Ply

When last we saw this yarn, I had split up the roving and was done with one bobbins worth of spinning…and the goal of the project was to attempt to spin a two-ply that maintained the color sequence in the as-dyed fiber. I wasn’t sure how well this was going to work out – partially because even split lengthwise, the two halves of a hand-dyed roving are not exactly alike – and I had to swap the tails on my two halves since they weren’t well matched after the first split.

In any case, the 2nd bobbin spun up smoothly and I set them up in my handy shoe-box lazy kate and got to the plying….

While the colors didn’t exactly match up, I think they stayed fairly well together, so I think the experiment was mostly a success 🙂   I did have some learnings in the course of this spin – some of them pertain to spinning on my traditional wheel – I had forgotten how nice it is to spin along and not really feel the pull of the take-up (as tends to happen with my Roberta electronic spinner).  I never really did pay much attention to wheel ratio before in my spinning – mostly because I had gotten in the habit of spinning primarily on my e-spinner rather than on a wheel that had ratios for me to worry about.  In any case, I have a tendency to spin low twist singles – I try consciously to spin higher twist singles when I know I intend to ply, but sometimes I zone back out, not really paying attention to what I’m doing and I slip back into hold habits. As for the plying, I have usually just let the yarn more or less naturally ply itself – and in the case of low twist singles and mindless plying, it tends to turn out a fairly loosely plied yarn.

While the yarn is fine to knit up as it is, it may be prone to being a bit splitty in the knitting….the good news is loosely plied yarn is something easily enough remedied by sending it back through the spinning wheel one more time to add a bit more twist.  I’ll likely do that at some point before I transform the yarn into a knitted project – right now I have no plans for it as yet so it will percolate with my other handspun yarns waiting for the right project to spring it onto the needles.

Details: Southern Cross Fibre Trickster on Polwarth.  October 2012 club offering.  110 g / 464 yards – fingering weight 2-ply